Faculty Trust, Conflict and the Use of Knowledge in an International Higher Education Context

Abstract

Few studies have examined group dynamics among faculty in higher education organizations. This is unfortunate since a well-functioning, collaborating faculty group has been shown to have a positive effect on both staff and student performance. Another important, but underexplored theme is the effect of university internationalization. In this study, we combine these two scarcely studied themes and focus on the role of interpersonal trust, group emotional conflict, and group task conflict in international university departments. Our findings reveal that while interpersonal trust is positively associated with the faculty members’ use of each other’s knowledge the opposite is true for group emotional conflict. We found no effect of group task conflict. But we found that the percentage of foreigners in a department negatively moderated the effect of interpersonal trust on knowledge use. Hence, the role of trust is less important for faculty’s use of each other’s knowledge resources in highly cultural diverse departments compared to less heterogeneous settings.